The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Electronic commerce has become widespread and many individuals have become high-volume customers of online merchants. The rapid expansion of online commerce has led to an equally active secondary market in which individuals and businesses engaging in high volumes of online purchases have developed a need to resell merchandise in an efficient manner. A difficult problem in this context, however, is managing data relating to purchases and sales.
For example, a particular customer might buy twenty items from online merchants within a particular time period, and then wish to resell eight of the items after receiving the items. Resale might be motivated by dissatisfaction with received items, or a change in needs, or the desire to dispose of slightly used goods that are still in merchantable condition. To arrange resale, the owner of the items typically needs to create an item record in an online sales site such as EBAY, AMAZON, etc. To create the item record, the user normally is required to manually enter descriptive data about the item, as well as take or download images of the item.
The resulting data entry can impose a significant burden in terms of time or costs on the prospective seller, especially for parties who purchase a large quantity of goods and seek to resell a large quantity of goods. As a consequence, the online transaction platforms that facilitate the resale transaction ultimately do not process as many transactions as might be possible.